1st Appearance Iron Man Figure Review.

Even more Iron Man 2 crap! What can I say? The damn movie isn’t even out yet but it’s EVERYWHERE, and since it’s so close that means the toy line has just kicked in. Like last summer’s Wolverine movie toy line this one will be split up into both a comic based line and film based line, only difference here is that IM2 will have a third line devoted to ‘concept’ armors. Meaning weird made up crap to sell to kids.

Believe it or not the concept armors they’ve released so far are actually cool. Helps that a guy like Stark would more than likely have 3 billion different armors about, unlike say Spidey who by all accounts should barely be able to afford the ONE suit.

The line is in the 4 inch scale, which seems to be the trend at Hasbro these days, eh to each their own- bonus being that you can display them alongside the Joes of the last few years if you collected them (I did 🙂 ). So now, less procrastinating and more reviewing!

As you can see above this is the comic’s version of Tony Stark’s first suit of armor, built while he was a prisoner of the evil Vietnamese (it was the 60’s remember that) and dying from shrapnel….Hell you know the origin dammit (and if not, why would HERE be your first exposure?). Anyways the armor looks like something you’d build with spare scraps of metal. The paint is fantastic and I’d say this is by far the best version of this armor ever produced! See prior releases tended to focus more on the clunkiness of the armor, and generally making it look brand new with a bright shiny silver paint job. At best you’d get a ding in the armor, and that’s just one I mean, this being the first version (which technically can’t count since it was the similar gold skirted version) that was released with the old late 90’s Avengers boxed set.

The only other (which had a gold Variant as well) still maintained a slightly clunky if polished up look

What places the new figure above those is most definitely the paint. Unlike before, where it looked almost store bought new, now we have an armor that seriously looks like you need your shots before and after wearing. Dull grey instead of shiny silver covers the body now, with the addition of silver scratches and a rust colored….I guess you could say wash over it. Unfortunately the paint is great except for one problem. They skipped the rust on the back! Yup, just grey and silver (was too lazy to snap a pic…sorry)

Being that this is the earlier armor, movement is a little limited. Not saying he’s lacking articulation. That’s hardly the case, it’s more to do with the stiffness of his joint (hmm just had Wizard of Oz pop into my head for some reason…) as it is he appears to have the same amount as the average Marvel figure- a great deal, not old school Toy Biz, but a good medium. I don’t like the stiffness as it makes posing difficult. Only other gripe is the ankle joints being poorly done- really he looks like a damn robot with joints like that!

After all that you get two accessories: The stand with armor cards (three cards that overlay to show the armor- they fit into the stand as a display) but I can’t find them to show you. The other thing is really not necessary, since I remember no instance of this with this armor, but old clunky here comes with a snap on energy blast for his hand. Nothing really to say, it’s solid enough that it won’t wilt…but I don’t plan on displaying it that way.

And that’s about it. Only other thing I can think to mention is, like other Marvel figures I’ve seen, he appears to be a little larger in scale than the Joe line. Which works in this case since a guy in armor would be a bit larger. Overall it’s a solid figure and I’d happily recommend it.

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KyleThoreau is a time-traveling axe murderer from the 1800’s. He stopped in the 2000’s because he ran out of the secret time-travel juice that the cyborg clone of Abe Lincoln gave him. He must now find the clone of Abe to return to his time-travel duties. In the meantime he has decided to report on geeky news and read comic books.